Untitled - Electric Scotland

1856-60] ST. GEORGE S IN THE EAST 231
Litany, were chanted, to the great
dislike of the old-
fashioned members of the congregation. Unfortunately,
Mr. King, with all his earnestness, had not the gift, in
introducing such changes as he thought necessary, of doing
it in a conciliatory manner. His congregation, partly
from the removal of the richer parishioners into the
suburbs, partly from other causes, grew steadily smaller,
and when in 1856 he announced his intention of adopting
the then almost unheard-of Eucharistic Vestments, a more
widespread dissatisfaction began. The dissatisfied, how
ever, contented themselves with grumbling and absenting
themselves more and more from the unpopular services.
Outside the Church s walls, in the meantime, Mr. King s
influence and authority were yet further on the wane. He
has himself described his position as follows :-
"The number of souls nominally intrusted to my charge was
I allude to the amount of the merely
about 38,000. . . . When
ordinary routine of clerical duties, in the celebration of the daily
services and the occasional religious offices, . . .
[as well as] the
merely secular duties which devolved upon me as Chairman of
the Vestry, ... it will not be a matter of any surprise if I now
confess that, beyond the exercise of something like discipline in
regard to a few extreme cases such as the refusal to give
Christian burial to unbaptized children, or to permit the bodies
of some who had died in open sin to be taken into the Church
for that portion of the Burial Service, and the refusal to communi
cate one or two notorious evil livers I was never able even to
make any attempt at anything like active aggression upon the
seething mass of evil and sin by which I was encompassed." l
The examples of discipline here instanced by Mr.
King himself as his sole attempts at active aggression
upon the evil around him serve well to illustrate the
character of his earnest but ineffectual ministry at St.
1 Letter from Mr. Bryan King in Mr. Lowder s Twenty-one
St. George s Mission, p. 227. The italics are Mr. King s.
Years in